


Lady In Waiting

by jusrecht



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-08
Updated: 2011-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jusrecht/pseuds/jusrecht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Queen Guinevere, in the absence of her king.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lady In Waiting

Her first winter as Camelot’s Queen came without her king.

Four months had passed since she had seen her husband last. There was war on every border, the curse of every ascension of a new ruler. Camelot was weak, the wind-borne rumours whispered. A king who married a servant, a king who succumbed to the flimsy whispers of love, a king who indulged in caprices and chose to disregard the credence of his duty could not possibly be a great one. Uther’s boy was weak.

Gwen had learned of this fact soon after her marriage. Uther was right, his deathbed warnings true; they would never accept her. Love was but an allegory, an illusion which belonged to fireside stories and songs of old. Propriety was the true value, of knowing one’s place, of abiding by one’s duty, for only then could be order and peace.

Arthur had smiled and told her to think nothing of it. But now he was far away, fighting a war he wouldn’t have fought if not for her—and at the top of the castle, Gwen pulled her cloak tighter as snowflakes drifted about her in a slow, aimless dance. Alone, she thought of the length of her selfishness, of regret.

 

–

 

Spring arrived and she put on a smile on her face every morning the way court ladies applied rogue on their lips.

Winter was bad enough, but spring brought a different demand—of fields and untended soil and unsown seeds. The men had yet to return, and so it was the wives, daughters, and elders who toiled day after day to turn barrenness into fecundity.

At the beginning of the planting season, Gwen saddled a horse and visited all surrounding farms and outlying villages, her heads filled with figures and acres. Upon her return, she coordinated and divided what manpower they had left that each field was sure to be tended, and implored any able city folk to take part in the work. Then she would take to the fields herself, unused to idleness after a lifetime of hard work. It broke her heart to see small children struggling with hoes and ploughs taller than their builds, but the kingdom needed every help or the coming winter would unleash famine upon them.

Slowly, she learned to smile with aching feet and a bleeding heart.

 

–

 

Summer came with sickness and plague.

It came from the water, Gaius told her, face lined with weariness and age. Water was indispensible and all he could do was to battle the sickness when it had taken root. Gwen thought of the women and children and elders, their emaciated faces and thin limbs, their hard work, their few provisions.

“What can we do?” she asked him. He spoke of rare herbs and intensive care, boiled water and the need of sanitation. By the end of the day, she had set up tents at corners of the castle ground, around wells and water reservoirs. Few men and women—those who did not lie on a sickbed, moaning in agony—could be spared from the hungry fields. Gwen knew what she must do, a queen or not, and so she traded hoes for armfuls of firewood and wet rags immersed in basins of cool water. She wore a smile even as she knelt on hard stone floor and gently wiped beads of perspiration from the sick.

The disapproval in Gaius’s expression was clear for her to read. It took a while for Gwen to summon enough courage to meet his narrowed stare with her own determination.

“I know what I’m doing,” she told him.

“I understand that you want to be useful.” His voice was soft, slow, filled with exhaustion. “What you are doing is admirable, Gwen, but you are not a common woman anymore. We cannot lose the queen to illness, especially now that the king is absent.”

Between who she was and what she was, Gwen could not find an answer. She chose to look away and continued folding clean clothes she had just washed and dried.

That night, in the grip of fever, she lay in her bed and thought of death and dying, death and dying, death and dying. Red rivers of blood ceded to barren wastelands, strewn with dust and hollow corpses; _her_ failure, not his.

That night, Arthur did not come into her dreams.

 

–

 

Autumn birthed a long-awaited sight in the east. An army made its presence known on the horizon, dots of black steadily drawing closer. The size was not a fifth of what had departed, nine months ago. Gaius’s face spoke of unease as they both watched its slow progress from the highest tower; Gwen clung to silence for she could not bring herself to voice the question.

It could be Arthur. It could be not.

She waited just behind the gate as the drawbridge was lowered. When two of the frontmost riders dismounted and uncloaked themselves, she almost fell to her knees.

“Is he…?” The word caught in her throat as they approached, but Merlin shook his head.

“Arthur sent me and Lancelot back,” he explained, the presence and warmth of his hand on her elbow a sudden source of power. “There were rumours of a hostile army marching to Camelot. The city might be in danger.”

“The war is not over then,” she murmured—a statement, not a question.

“Soon,” he told her, and though his smile was comforting, gravity did not leave his eyes. Gwen would have wept if not for the hundreds of eyes watching every flicker of emotion across her face.

She summoned a smile instead, and led the weary travellers into the castle.

 

–

 

Winter stole upon them without a sound.

The whiteness painted silence and stillness throughout the entire kingdom. Gwen opened her eyes every morning to a cold, grey dawn and a heart too starved to feel. She was numb, inert, hollow. Even the sharpest pain would be blunted by time, its edges word down by familiarity. Her only consolation, the only thing which still could coax a true smile out of her instead of a practised guise, was those of her people. Her efforts throughout spring, summer, and fall had not gone to waste, and Arthur would still have a kingdom to return to when the war finally ceased. At least he, Gwen told herself every night before she went to bed, had not married an entirely useless woman.

“It will be over soon,” Merlin repeated the words like a promise carved in stone. He clasped her hand and smiled. He followed her when she made her daily round about the city. His magic was a source of comfort and he used it liberally, taking pleasure only in the grateful smiles he would harvest in return. On many fine, cloudless days, he took her for a walk outside the castle walls as the pale sun climbed above snow-draped landscape.

“The great stories never told this tale,” he spoke at one occasion, in that quiet, measured way he had acquired after many months at the front line, sleeping with death. “A queen whose beauty destroyed a city, yes; a queen whose cruelty built a dynasty, yes; a queen whose betrayal ended a great age, yes; but never a queen who waited, a queen whose devotion weathered time’s passing and withstood the suffering of not knowing. Why is that, I wonder?”

“Because there is no greatness in it,” Gwen answered.

“No carnage, you mean.” His lips curled and it was distaste more than pleasure. “I always find it strange that great battles and victories are zealously recorded and praised upon, but peace never commands the same admiration.”

Gwen shook her head. “None of those matters to me. I’m a simple woman, Merlin. I do not think of legacies to leave when I die or tales with which to remember my name. None of it is important. I only wish, oh how I _wish_.”

She looked up in surprise when she felt a cold hand touch her cheek. “And no one ever mentions a queen who braves heartache and misery with only the sword of courage and shield of faith,” Merlin murmured.

Gwen had to blush at the heartfelt praise. “Now you are painting a picture,” she reproached, smiling a little. “I am nowhere as noble.”

“Nobility is in the eye of the beholder, Gwen,” he pointed out, beaming in return. “It is the people who determine whether a queen is noble or not, not she herself.”

“I suppose this is where you start lamenting a queen whose only garment is modesty.”

“Not quite.” A familiar glint appeared in his eyes; Gwen realised, with a sudden pang, that she had not seen this mischievous side of Merlin for a long time. “Should she _only_ be clad in modesty, then I doubt the story is one entirely of virtue.”

Her laugh came rough and stilted, her throat unused to so merry a sound after two winters of misery. But it was there nevertheless, and the echo carried far in the white, silent world. Merlin’s grin softened as he linked their hands together, sharing warmth.

“Arthur walked through fire and ice to marry you,” he said solemnly. “He will not give up so easily,”

Queen Guinevere of Camelot smiled. “And neither will I.”

 

__  
**End**   



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